Grow and lead for all of us

Race and culture

Yesterday’s email and my anti-White-Fragility Ti-shirt

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Hi Friends,

My email to you yesterday—”Want resilience? (Black) American culture has you covered”—prompted numerous comments and one request. Most were about culture rather than how it makes you resilient, but it’s still early! Allow me to close the loop.

1. There was no link to the online version. Please share.

Oops, true. Here it is: https://amielhandelsman.com/newsletter-071520/

2. Strikes me as brave for you to challenge the white fragility label

Thank you. It’s certainly unfashionable. The Ti-shirt would say “Neither white nor fragile but anti-racist since 2000.” This is when meditation taught me to notice the flurry of ideas of dubious goodness, truth and beauty passing through my mind. Among these then and now are racist ideas that swim in the culture. I would just as soon apologize for breathing oxygen or wearing slacks with a belt.

If Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, said to me, “Admit it. You have racist ideas,” I’d reply, “You betcha. Who doesn’t? My question for you is how to have such ideas rather than letting them have you.” Here, to invert the Heath Brothers (Made to Stick), the goal is to reduce the mind’s adhesive qualities. This leads to practices like meditation, compassionate self-reflection, somatic bodywork and naming-the-Steve Wonder-inside-of-you, all of which sadly aren’t part of today’s White Fragility curriculum. Plus, ironically, DiAngelo treats black folks as delicate members of an undifferentiated mass rather than complex individuals with varying personalities, skills and interests who carry proud heroic traditions, like jazz and overcoming adversity, that have always been deeply influenced by and interwoven into other dimensions of American culture. See: Henry Louis Gates, Colored People; Albert Murray, Omni-Americans; Charles Johnson, Middle Passage; or anything by Toni Morrison. 

3. This is a much-needed approach, Amiel. All the hangdog/pain/victim stuff gets old, stale, mind-numbing and counterproductive mighty quickly. It all degenerates into empty rituals and phrase-mongering.

This comment came from a successful professional writer who in a much earlier life worked for the Nation of Islam and has tracked this topic for decades. It highlights how aligning with an ideology can cause well-meaning people to produce unintended consequences they might regret. This traps opens widely when everyone you know is reading the same books and citing the same experts. Ironically, today’s most popular thinker on anti-racism, Ibram Kendi, has a far more complex and nuanced take than many people who cite him. In Stamped from the Beginning, he says that there are no racist people, only racist ideas; that many civil rights leaders we admire used racist ideas to justify their positions (lesson for you and me: there’s no shame in having racist ideas, only in holding them); and that altruism is a self-defeating motivation for action.

4. I have been really struggling with the more absolutist/monolithic aspects of BLM/antiracism and the like, yet I have been terrified to say much of anything publicly.

I’m hearing this a lot, especially from light-skinned folks who for years have been taking actions that today we’d call anti-racist. (In college I attended several Black Student Association meetings mostly out of curiosity but also to listen for new perspectives). Such silencing of would-be partners is another unintended consequence of an unreflective version of the anti-racism/white fragility ideology.  Although it feels noble and contains important truths, it evokes shame and sends cortisol and other stress hormones hurtling through the nervous system.

Thanks, everyone, for the comments!

Cheerfully real,
Amiel Handelsman

P.S. Did someone forward this issue to you? I’d love to have you join us by signing up here.

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Want resilience? (Black) American culture has you covered (July 15, 2020 issue)

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Hi Friends,

I hope you enjoy this week’s actionable insights. Hit Reply and let me know what you think.

Black lives matter. Black heroes matter, too.

This, in a nutshell, is the theme of this week’s email. I bring together in an unexpected and hopefully refreshing way two big conversations:

  1. How do you build resilience in yourself, your team, and your family amidst Covid, organizational changes, and economic uncertainty?
  2. How are you responding to the killing of George Floyd and all it represents?

I think it’s time to breathe complexity into the second conversation in a way that offers us practical wisdom for dealing with the first.

Simply put, if you want to build resilience in the people around you and do something noble for the larger world—particularly if you don’t identify your cultural roots as primarily black American—these resources may be valuable. In fact, as I said about Stevie Wonder last week during my 50th birthday party when two partygoers sang to me his version of Happy Birthday, they’re likely already part of you, whether you know it or not.

Want resilience? Use these two resources from (black) American culture

I include the word “black” because women and men of darker complexion contributed disproportionately to these resources for overcoming adversity. Credit where credit is due. I put “black” in parentheses because these are fundamentally American cultural resources that are valuable right now to all Americans (and readers from other countries).

1. Jazz. Many call it America’s original art form. This music invites many things, but stagnation and resignation are not among them. When I’m looking to move through difficult emotions, I listen to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington (and Earth, Wind & Fire—more on that another time!) There’s a reason these rhythms are the perfect antidote to aching hearts and weary souls. They were born in adversity and grew through courageous improvisation, led by Americans of dark complexion. I recently came across these words from Ralph Ellison, which seem well suited to our moment:

During the Depression whenever [Duke Ellington’s] theme song ‘East St. Louis Toodle-oo’ came on the air, our morale was lifted by something inescapably hopeful in the sound. Its style was so triumphant and the moody melody so successful in capturing the times, yet so expressive of the faith which would see us through them.

2. Heroic tales of overcoming. Last time I wrote that Harriet Tubman is the quintessential American hero. This is what I remember learning in elementary school, and it made sense. In the mind of an 11-year-old, I don’t really understand slavery, and this is a lot to take in, but what she accomplished was really really hard! Yet somehow in today’s public conversation this part of history gets left out. Apparently, my job as a light-skinned man is to learn how black Americans have been screwed. OK. That sure is better than ignorance, and it’s a beat I’ve been on since college. But why stop there? Isn’t there more to the story than a people’s suffering? And if talking about this topic made me “fragile” (which it doesn’t, and even the “white” half of “white fragility” is a dubious proposition), wouldn’t I want to approach it in a way that made me strong or at least able to manage my own difficult emotions? Here’s an idea: what if every time you or I heard a story of suffering or oppression, we took it upon ourselves to search for the concurrent story of heroism and overcoming? Here are three reasons for doing this: 

First, it happened. The history is there. In the words of American writer, Albert Murray:

As for the tactics of the fugitive slaves, the Underground Railroad was not only an innovation, it was also an extension of the American quest for democracy brought to its highest level of epic heroism. Nobody tried to sabotage the Mayflower.

Second, human beings of every hue are so damn complex that a single narrative about anyone, however noble in intent, doesn’t cut it.

Finally, and here’s the kicker. You, I, and everyone we know needs these stories. Times are hard and uncertain, and we draw strength from our common history. And by “our” I mean all of us. If you don’t think that black American history isn’t part of who you are, think again. The culture we inherit is hybrid. Our cultural ancestors include everyone from Harriet Tubman and Daniel Boone to so-called WASPs and my Jewish great grandparents from Ukraine and Hungary.

Black Heroes Matter.

Cheerfully real,

Amiel Handelsman

P.S. Did someone forward this issue to you? I’d love to have you join us by signing up here.

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Integral Politics With Jeff Salzman (Episode 109)

Integral Politics With Jeff Salzman (Episode 109)

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Integral politics involves appreciating what’s good, true, and beautiful and what’s missing in every worldview in our culture. This is neither the mushy middle nor mere theory, but instead a practical way forward in a puzzling world. The idea of integral politics is straightforward: listen closely to every perspective, take the best, and jettison the rest. Breathe in the truth. Breathe out the partial nature of it. Just as a good health program involves supplementing different practices, integral politics asks: why not also supplement different worldviews?

A Leading Voice Of Integral Politics

For many years, Jeff Salzman has been a leading voice of integral politics. Through his podcast, The Daily Evolver, Jeff has brought this integral vantage point to everything from Presidential politics to #metoo to movies to economics.

This week, Jeff joins me to describe the tribal, warrior, traditional, modern, and postmodern worldviews and the many ways they battle in today’s politics. We discuss political correctness on college campuses, Cold War anticommunism, why God is both everywhere and nowhere, how life is a heartbreaking catastrophe yet we go on, the post-war liberal consensus and how it shattered, what Jeff does when encountering politicians who trigger him, why psychopaths are people too, and how as a young adult Jeff got tired of sitting through yet another heterosexual love scene at the movies. Integral politics has something to say about all of this!

Integral Politics Stretches The Mind

This discussion of integral politics will stretch your mind, and it’s longer than our average episode, so you’ll get extended mind-stretching! (Note: the audio quality on my end in this interview is less than usual. I don’t know why.)

The Amiel Show is taking a six-week summer break, so you will have time to savor this conversation before I return with a new episode in September.

In other news, I turned 49 on Tuesday. I am dedicating my 50th year on the planet to sharing my interviews and ideas with more people. Way more people. I call it the Big Tribe project. You are a huge part of it, so here’s step one: if you are intrigued or inspired by what you hear, please share this interview with friends and encourage them to subscribe to the podcast.

I’m also offering a free copy of my E-Book, Leading When You’re Ticked Off And Other Tips For Mastering Complexity, in this blog post on my web site.

Highlights

  • 9:00 The discipline and faith of the traditional worldview. Jeff as church camper of the year.
  • 14:00 As humanity moves forward, there are more stages of development present
  • 21:00 There is a hierarchy of growth that is natural and beautiful
  • 26:30 Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants
  • 31:00 We get sick to death of the stage we’re at
  • 38:00 Posmodernism and “Where the fuck am I” in this movie?
  • 46:00 In a good-versus-evil society, you’d be irresponsible to not annihilate your enemy
  • 1:04:00 When you have a stack of worldviews at war with each other
  • 1:10:00 It’s good we’re battling in comments sections, not with clubs and knives
  • 1:24:00 The power of Mr. Trump’s shameless grandiose ego

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Episode 99: Resilience And Racialized Body Trauma With Diane Woods

Episode 99: Resilience And Racialized Body Trauma With Diane Woods

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First, let’s get one thing out of the way. Understanding trauma and how it functions is scientifically sound, empirically useful, and one of the most effective ways to develop to your full potential.

The great challenge of adulthood is embracing complexity. We do this by taking on multiple perspectives in our minds and building this capacity into our hearts and bodies.

Nowhere is this challenge more evident to me in the United States than in the area of cultural and racial conflict. Even those of us who are doing our best to create a better future have a lot of growing up to do.

You know what’s great about growing up? When we do it, the benefits accrue in all areas of life.

That’s why I think that reframing how we approach race and culture isn’t only about black and white. It also yields benefits in whatever context we choose to lead.

Sure, you could use what you learn about leadership from organizational life to make a contribution to our societal struggle with race, but this also works in reverse. The cauldron of racial relations can foster skills and qualities you need to show up at your best in organizations—and in your family and community.

I’ve had several guides in this journey. One is leadership coach and retired executive, Diane Woods. Last year, we discussed why it’s important to talk about racist ideas rather than racist people and how combatting racism is in whites’ self-interest. My mind is still stretching from that conversation.

This week, Diane asks us all to try on a very different, albeit compatible, lens for understanding our experiences in this area. Drawing upon Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands:Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Diane invites us to place the body—its trauma and its resilience—at the center of this story.

What if we set aside the patterned roles of victim, persecutor and rescuer in favor of a more complex body-centered understanding? What if, instead of either rationalizing racist behavior or demonizing each other, we did the following:

  • Set clear boundaries around racist words and behaviors
  • Understood racism as multigenerational trauma—black body trauma, white body trauma, and police officer body trauma?

As she did before, Diane speaks from her own experience, informed by her extensive reading, and in a way that invites us all to take a second look at our own lives and family’s experiences.

Highlights

  • 7:50 We’re in love with our minds & stop at the chin or neck
  • 15:00 Black and white bodies carry unresolved trauma between generations
  • 22:00 When people we love tell their stories, our anxiety and pain has meaning
  • 25:30 Dirty pain versus clean pain
  • 30:00 Indigestion leads to self-soothing—healthy or harmful
  • 32:20 “When the ouch in my body stayed three months”
  • 34:00 When I know my value, my capacity to bounce back is deeper
  • 39:30 We don’t have to condone racist behaviors to have a compassionate stance

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Episode 80: White Nationalism And Male Identity with Elizabeth Debold [The Amiel Show]

Episode 80: White Nationalism And Male Identity with Elizabeth Debold [The Amiel Show]

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A year ago Sunday, white nationalists marched on Charlottesville, Virginia carrying torches and chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” It was not a pretty sight. Most people I know found it abhorrent. The author Ta-Nehisi Coates did, too, but he wasn’t surprised. In an earlier episode Diane Woods explained why.

The media, for the most part, has highlighted the ethnocentric dimensions of this tale: racial grievance, hatred, and the specious theories underlying them.

Yet an important element has remained beneath the surface: gender. White nationalism is also a story of a certain group of men coming to terms with a world they find unfamiliar and threatening, one where women have economic power, men have lost their traditional identities, and the worlds of work, dating, and marriage have turned upside down. Many of us would call these advances of modernity and postmodernity. White nationalists see them as epic disasters.

This week, Elizabeth Debold, a developmental psychologist and gender futurist, explains why.

It’s a story of some human minds growing into greater degrees of complexity and others’ growth halting at age 12. It’s a story of wage labor, two-income households, and the demands of being a “super mom” and, increasingly, a “super dad.” It’s also a story of men confused about what is expected of them and frustrated that society often criticizes them for doing their “jobs” of working long hours and bringing home the bacon.

Debold also reframes the debate about so-called “social justice warriors” on college campuses. Everyone from Fox News to white nationalists to Jordan Peterson cite this group as the epitome of postmodern excess. Debold says: not so fast. The ideas may be postmodern, but the minds unpacking them are operating from a much earlier stage of development.

We live in a complex age, and it takes wisdom and a multi perspectival approach to even begin to understand it. Debold brings both and more.

In some ways, this interview represents a bridge in this podcast. As my interest turns toward global challenges and the health of our politics, Debold helps connect these concerns with my longstanding series on women in leadership, the newly launched series on the American experience of race, and the ever-present influence of constructivist developmental theory.

Highlights

  • 5:00 White nationalists, incels, and the loss of traditional male identity
  • 12:00 Richard Spencer is developmentally a teenager
  • 25:00 The flaw in pluralists’ views of white nationalists
  • 31:30 The wild card: when goodness appears
  • 48:00 The modern convention of dividing work and home life
  • 59:00 Teaching sophisticated postmodern ideas to 19-year-olds with less complex minds
  • 1:10:00 Step on my head, and I’ll step on yours back!

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Episode 75: Stomping the Blues, Reimagining American Identity with Greg Thomas [The Amiel Show]

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Fasten your seatbelts. This week, we’re going on a rollicking, rhythmic, high-minded, and heartfelt ride through the core of the American experience.

Greg Thomas, our guide through the True but Partial Challenge on race and, more recently The Jazz Leadership Project with Jewel Kinch-Thomas, joins me again to steer us through this week’s journey.

Or should I say: journeys?

That’s how much territory we cover. Greg even coaxes me to steer out of my “interviewer lane” and riff on my own experience stomping the blues.

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The focus of our conversation is Albert Murray, the great 20th century American writer and close colleague of Ralph Ellison.

Haven’t heard of him? Neither had I until a few months ago.

But since when did lack of fame mean anything about a person’s wisdom?

Like me, you will learn to take Albert Murray seriously. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison does. She wrote, “Murray’s perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor, and its tenacious hold on the intellect.”

Like me, you will get mesmerized by the ideas in Murray’s first book, The Omni-Americans. Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates wrote in his New Yorker profile of Murray (“The King of Cats”) that the book was “so pissed-off, jaw-jutting, and unapologetic that it demanded to be taken seriously.”

Highlights

  • 6:00 Albert Murray’s influence on American culture and art
  • 13:30 American identity synthesizes multiple roots
  • 20:00 Murray’s devastating critique of “ghettoologists” and “safari technicians”
  • 35:00 Decoding ancient fairy tales and applying them to life today
  • 39:00 The blues idiom as life compass
  • 43:00 The hero’s journey in American cultures, e.g. Harriet Tubman
  • 46:00 Hero’s journey is an alternative orientation from Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin
  • 55:30 We fear difference and are attracted to it. Can we integrate this into ourselves?
  • 59:00 The Jazz Leadership Project
  • 1:10:00 Apprentice, journeyman, and master

 

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Give Me a Rating or Review on iTunes (It’s Also Easy!)

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Next Tuesday we’ll stomp the blues

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Allow me to entice you.

Next Tuesday at 10am PST, the second to last day of Black History Month, check your email inbox.

I’ll give you an interview about the most important American writer on culture you’ve probably never heard of.

Unless your name is Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard, who called this writer “The King of Cats.”

Or Toni Morrison, who said, “Murray’s perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor, and its tenacious hold on the intellect.”

  • Name: Albert Murray
  • Focus: Hero’s journey, stomping the blues, critiquing “ghettologists,” appreciating that black culture is central to American culture
  • Quote: “The blues idiom is an attitude of affirmation in the face of difficulty, of improvisation in the face of challenge. It means that you acknowledge life is a low down dirty shame yet confront that fact with perseverance, with humor, and above all, with elegance.”
  • Our guide: Greg Thomas, former jazz columnist for the New York Daily News

Tuesday at 10am. It will lift you up.